FEATURE ARTICLES
PUSHING HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY BOUNDARIES HEALTHCARE ENGINEERING ACCOMPLISHMENTS NOW AND LOOKING TO THE FUTURE By Rafx Hamilton
Case Study: Cabrini Health Gandel Building Development
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n the modern healthcare environment fast and reliable communication and data transfer becomes a more critical and expected part of the infrastructure landscape with multiple options available. As technology moves forward to enable the sharing and storing of data and communications information and the lines between various support functions blurs, “future proofing” of infrastructure as best as possible becomes more difficult for health care engineers. Different user groups within a hospital have different information and connectivity requirements. Thoughtful infrastructure development can improve communication and connectivity, drive efficiencies and most importantly enhance the experience of the patient, practitioner and others using the health care facility. This case study will provide an overview of the infrastructure installed in the recently completed Cabrini Health Gandel building to facilitate data sharing and communications, and some of the considerations that led to the installation of that infrastructure. Cabrini Health is a Catholic, not for profit, healthcare organisation located in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We are owned by the Missionary sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, (the Cabrini Sisters). The age of the buildings at our main Malvern site ranges from the late 1950’s through to 2019. We have just completed construction of our new “Gandel Wing” named for John Gandel – one of our principal donors. This building has state of the art architecture and engineering and includes a high tech data backbone and connectivity designed to assist us to deliver the best outcomes for patients, families, doctors and staff.
This new Gandel building was recently featured in a Vogue Living article in August under the title “Is this the world’s most beautiful hospital?” So how did we go about creating this new building on our existing site? We first had to relocate the basement plant room contents of an existing building and all infrastructure within it – as this plantroom was located within the footprint of the proposed Gandel Wing. This infrastructure included 4 chillers that supplied chilled water to most of the existing facility, key pipelines in the medical gases infrastructure, including the main oxygen feed to the entire facility, key parts of our electrical infrastructure, including a substation that supplies 4 of our other existing buildings. Once the plant room was relocated into the basement of another building we demolished the existing 4 level 1970s building, (2 down, 2 up), that was sitting metres away from the rest of the operational buildings on the site. Excavation then began to prepare the site for the new building of 11 levels in total: (4 down, 7 up). The new building includes two radiation therapy bunkers in the B4 basement, and multiple levels of basement car parking with end of trip change and shower facilities on level B1 accessible from the outside. We expanded our existing A&E department on the ground floor, our cardiac facilities on the first floor, and our maternity facilities on the second floor, with other general medical wards above that including an oncology infusion treatment area. The level of the wards in the new building complements the other wards and medical precincts in the buildings that surround them.
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